Idea 1: Cyanotype portraits of people who live around Gowanus (in this style but instead using the materials found in the canal during development, then layered with video of the water. Maybe including a map?

Option 2: A map/collage component to a film I've been working on about my family's farm in Oklahoma, the pioneer myth and the stories of the Native Americans who sold their land to my great grandfather. The map would be a section line map.

Option 3. Another map! Before I came into the IMA program I had been working on a film in the Palestinian Territories about the mass incarceration of Palestinian men. But it doesn't feel like a film. It feels like an installation. I had started collecting the prisoner portraits, mostly of kids, and trying to find a way to illustrate how prevalent political imprisonment is by connecting all of these images by families. Now I'm wondering if it could be a family tree, or maybe a variation of a google map, where you would click on the image and a portion of their story would pop up. The images look like this:

In Emerging Media 1, I made a yearbook page of the kids

I have two issues that I'm grappling with for the Palestinian Prisoner Portrait. One is that it's hard not to turn it into shitty-things-that-happen-to-others porn, so I would also want to have some sort of call to action component. The other issue is that I feel hypocritical being American and criticizing Israel, especially with a social issue that's so popular with activists. I think I would feel better if I had at least one other project under my belt that was also critical of America's occupation activities and the number of people killed by our government in the name of fighting terrorism.

I was really inspired by the drone strike website you showed in class. It would be amazing to add a visual element, with actual faces and stories, to that project, as well as a call to action so Americans feel like changing the situation is not so far out of reach.